A Whole Other Person

336.2 lbs.

Hello Blog. Been a long, long, time, hasn't it? I'd pretty much forgotten about you what with my new job dealing cards, and my spiral into complete complacency and depression. I'd best get my rear in gear then, I suppose, and start putting my life back together. After a series of battles with dieting, and really, dieting well, just losing the will to eat well, of all things, I tipped the scales this morning at 336.2 pounds. That's 137 pounds over weight and 153 over my ideal weight. That's a whole other person in there, and today, I gotta start killing him off. He shrugs and comes up with a thousand reasons why I shouldn't do what I'm good at. Well, fuck him. I'm going to get back to what I do best: Obscure, left-wing Al Hamiltory politics... also, expecting people to get obscure references like that.

I have found only one side of my life rolling along as it should: I don't struggle to make ends meet, by virtue of living cheap. No car, roommates, few bars, not too many gadgets. This is what makes me save money and lets me work four days a week. It's pretty easy when you can live on next to nothing, but then, not everyone has it so easy. Not everyone can split a two bedroom apartment three ways or has no dependents or the intelligence and wit to really be able to fall back on and know that they can keep working without too much difficulty... so I'm a little lucky that way... but then, most needs are really excuses at any rate. And what we most need is an absence of excuses. Lots of people make excuses, and their favorite one, simply because of its statistical significance, is their tax burden... hence why, when the government should be spending billions more on [wood] Planes [for building social housing], Trains, and [electric] Automobiles, we're once again blowing the money on tax cuts for the already making ends meet.

Dear, 'Middle Class:' You're poorer now because you've castrated government with your endless exemptions for the family with 2.1 kids, 1.2 dogs and 1.4 incomes. The weaker government had to pass on those tax cuts all the way up the ladder, leaving us with a still progressive, but more hobbled revenue stream. And now, it's happening again. Twenty more bucks on your paycheque is, well, 20 more bucks, but it pales in comparison to what that money would actually do for creating jobs, building infrastructure that might shorten your monthy commuting time by more than an hour or two, improving our universities, or avoiding public sector hiring freezes that will limit job opportunities for your children... you know, just incase the sports tax credit isn't the tipping point that makes them an NHL star.

And what's more, is that it pales in comparison to the slide in real wages over the last 35 years. If you're like me, you probably got a raise in pay that just falls short of inflation... maybe half a percent. Half a percent of 50K isn't much... but what about 17%? That's how short we've fallen since '73 That's the promise of generations passed being torn from your fingers and already ripped from your children's, and all because we haven't spent adequate public dollars to ensure that it's easy to keep the job you have without being abused by skinflint employers, that it's inexpensive to get to your job with good public transport and, to a diminishing extent, roads, because energy prices constantly rise, owing to our unwillingness to build the clean, and green, and long-term energy grid that we all know is the most logical solutuion... and because we've pulled a comprehensive university education further out of reach of working class Canadian children, causing them to aim low, and to misuse obvious talents. At any rate, these deficits will, as Diefenbaker's did in the late fifties, stauch the flow of jobs and incomes, but they fail to capture a perfect opportunity to not just save the economy in the short term, but build it for the long term, as that government, that toryism, so long forgotten, crumbles like our ambitions... not all at once, but, after a while, turn around and there you are... missing yourself.